Social movements, community education, and the fight for racial justice: Black women and social transformation

Abstract

This article addresses the role of community learning within social movements and the fight for social justice and human rights. To understand contemporary social movements and their role in community learning and advocacy for social change, it is essential to contextualize them within the long history of Black women's activist labor and accomplishments. The #BLM movement is presented as a continuation of Black women's longstanding inclusive activism, punctuated by the Abolition, Suffrage, Civil Rights, and modern feminist movements. It highlights the efforts of specific Black women community leaders in creating counterpublics that make claims to power and work to change the status quo. Black women, through their inclusive, community‐based activist endeavors, continue to carve out fugitive spaces and counterpublics where counternarratives are actively generated to fight for a more equitable and inclusive democracy that serves all. This article conceptualizes the role of adult education in social movements and transformative change.

Structural acuity: Black women undergraduate students in cross-racial intergroup dialogues.

“…This finding stands consistent with other scholarship demonstrating that Black women broadly have historically identified and continue to identify with more progressive—if not radical—political struggles centering on racial and social justice within and beyond education (Beauboeuf–Lafontant, 1999; Dowe, 2020; A. D. James-Gallaway & Harris, 2021; Roumell & James-Gallaway, 2021). Winkle-Wagner (2009) highlighted the strain Black women undergraduates faced when integrating into a midwestern HWI, as they reported experiencing culture shock and racial exclusion due to the overwhelming Whiteness of their institution.…”

“…Their doing so was recently displayed in Summer 2020's the so-called racial reckoning and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Many Black women, however, have faced marginalization throughout such events (Roumell & James-Gallaway, 2021). This issue also occurs in higher education (Patton & Ward, 2016), where social justice education and broader, popularized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts like intergroup dialogue (IGD) rarely reflect Black women's interests or needs (Roland et al, 2021), raising questions about their experience therein.…”

Black History in Adult Education in the United States: A Historical Review and Historiographical Critique

“…After a flourishing of historical writing about Black AE in the 1990s, the topic received sustained attention in the 21st century with most of the publications appearing in book chapters or in journals not listed on AAACE's online resource guide. Contributions have included a variety of subjects, such as the role of adult learning in cultivating resistance among enslaved people (Bohonos & James-Gallaway, 2022), discussions of Black women's market activity in the antebellum era (Smith, 2001), an article about a racially integrated college in Kentucky established in 1850 (Day et al, 2013), AE in the Harlem Renaissance (Johnson-Bailey, 2001, 2006), Black experiences dealing with the American Association for Adult Education (Guy & Brookfield, 2009), Anna Julia Cooper's work in AE in the 1930s and 1940s (Johnson, 2009), Bernice Robinson (Ntiri, 2014), Septima Clark and freedom schools (Baumgartner, 2005; Charron, 2009), Black women self-help and collective action (Nembhard, 2015), Black intellectual thought regarding AE (Grant et al, 2015), the 1968 Poor People's Campaign (Hamilton, 2013, 2016), Alain Locke (Nocera, 2018; Stewart, 2018), Black women and 20th century social movement learning (Roumell & James-Gallaway, 2021), labor organizing (Ross-Gordon & Alston, 2015), welfare reform (Alfred, 2006), and teaching (Chapman, 2015), racialized and gendered public history (Merriweather, 2020), treatments of race and disability history in 20th and 21st century HRD handbooks and textbooks (Bohonos & Johnson-Bailey, in press; Bohonos et al, in press), several chapters in an edited collection of 20th century adult educator biographies (Issac-Savage, 2021; Johnson-Bailey, 2021; Merriweather, 2021; Ntiri, 2021), and Black military education (Harris, 2018, 2022; White, 2012). These recent works have done much to enhance the field's understanding of its history, but also leaves a gap relative to our understandings of Black AE from the Civil War to the end of the 19th century.…”

Media and government framing of asylum seekers and migrant workers in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The election of xenophobic figures (such as Trump in the United States [US], Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines), for example, points to the role of social media and legacy media in fuelling fires of hate. However, Elizabeth Roumell and ArCasia James-Gallaway ( 2021 ) also describe how the Black Lives Matter movement made tactical and sophisticated use of social media to tell the stories of Black people, and to organise resistance to continued corporate and state oppression.…”